I'm the environment editor at Forbes. Before joining Forbes in April 2011, I wrote about all things green and tech as a contributor to The New York Times, a senior editor at Fortune and an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine. I previously was the business editor at the San Jose Mercury News and during the (first) dot-com era served as a senior writer and senior editor at The Industry Standard (RIP).

Electric Carmaker Coda Lays Off 15% Of Workforce

In another sign that electric car startups are struggling to gain traction, Coda Automotive has laid off 15% of its staff.

Forrest Beanum, Coda’s senior vice president of government relations and external affairs, said the company has let go 50 workers “across all functions to streamline our operations and right-size the company.”

“The company is taking this action to better position our business going forward,” Beanum said in a statement. “We remain committed to the continued development and distribution of our products.”

The Los Angeles startup launched in 2009 and in March of this year began selling a $38,145 Chinese-made, California-designed-and-assembled battery powered sedan called the Coda.

By the time Coda hit the market, it faced competitively priced rivals like the Nissan Leaf, the Ford Focus Electric and the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt.

Though the Coda’s claimed range of 125 miles beats the Leaf And Focus Electric by 50 miles, the car’s pedestrian styling – it resembles a late ’90s Honda Civic – has not wowed buyers and it garnered generally tepid reviews by automotive writers who found the car’s quality and performance lacking.

As former Tesla Motors chief executive Martin Eberhard told me in a 2007 interview as the company struggled to get the Roadster to market, “Building cars is really hard. A thousand things can go wrong every day.”

Just ask Fisker Automotive, another Southern California startup whose six-figure Karma plug-in electric sports sedan is sex on wheels but has been plagued by quality issues

Timing can be everything as well.

Think, the now-defunct Norwegian electric carmaker, sold a battery-powered urban runabout in the late ‘90s before being acquired by Ford, which later sold the company. In 2006, a professor and entrepreneur named Jan-Olaf Willums and his partners bought Think and retooled it to produce an electric car for the Internet age, attracting investment from General Electric among other blue-chip investors.

Other companies and automakers have adopted some of Willums’ ideas – battery leasing, mobile apps – but by the time Think actually began producing the plastic-bodied two-seater it faced much bigger competitors who offered larger and better equipped electric cars for around the same price. Perpetually short of cash and unable to attract new investment, Think ended up in bankruptcy.

Now the question is whether Coda can avoid being the coda to the electric car startup era.

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